Hello everyone. I'm new to this board and from what I see it's a fantastic place to talk about ancient arms and weaponry! It also appears that everyone here is well versed in ancient swords and weaponry, so I'm hoping I can get some reliable information here.

As you can see from the title of this post, this regards Deadliest Warrior, and I know many people are familiar with this show. While we all know that the producers at Spike couldn't care less about historical accuracy, some of the forum people on Spike do. In fact I'm currently working with one such individual who's writing text based articles on different matchups that weren't done on the show, but the biggest difference is that he is striving to make everything as historically accurate as possible.

This is where I could use the help of you guys here. When it comes to searching for information on certain warrior cultures I can't really tell what information is credible or which is just pure speculation. Anyone could go to Wikipedia and look things up, but information there is dubious at best. I want to make absolute sure that when I send over the proper short range, mid range, and long range weapons to this guy they are historically accurate and really would have been used as weapons.

I don't know if many of you out there would know anything about non-European or non-Medieval weaponry, but I'm willing to give it a shot here. As of right now, here's the warriors that I'm researching for future articles right now:

Lapu Lapu's warriors (Mactan Island, Philippines)

Imperial Inca warrior

Hawaiian warrior during Kamehameha's rule

Joseon Dynasty soldier

English longbowman (i.e. what Robin Hood would've been armed with if he was real)

If anyone is curious, the guy's name on the Spike forums is iHonk, and here is his article page. While it may not be 100% historic dissertation, I can assure you that his assessments are MUCH better than anything Deadliest Warrior would ever present:

The entire premise is flawed. Even assuming that the producers can get the equipment and training correct (which I seriously doubt) they are entirely lacking context. You can't just pit one reenactor against another and expect a realistic outcome. The vast majority of fighters on that show were optimised for fighting in formation, not one on one. It is worse than people arguing about which martial art is the best. It is largely irrelevant. The most skilled fighter will win in the majority of cases regardless of his style or equipment.

What you need is actual military experts/ historians, such as Mike Loades. Real Experts that know what there talking about and will be a sport about it (seriously hate the smack talking >_<). Those guys have dedicated their lives to studying this stuff. Deadliest warriors "experts" are a joke half the the time. You can't grab a army vet that is a fan of Spartans and call him an expert.

I totally agree with Dan on this one. No matter what its really gonna come down to skill and experience in the long run. If anything it would be nice to not only have someone that really does know what there talking about, but also to have the appropriate equipment and historical names for the weapons. It drove me up the wall when they called the flail the morning star!

There are no deadly weapons, only deadly people....They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh, because of fear in the night. -The Song of Songs, Which Is Solomon's

For the longbowman, pick up a copy of The Great Warbow. It provides the best present research. Kit depends a lot on period, but the main weapon is of course the 100-180lb bow. With a heavy arrow a close range, the impact energy would be 97-175 J. Archers typically wore either light or no armor. Anything beyond a brigandine would be rare. Padded jacks seem to have been the most common. Melee weapons include the sword and buckler, longsword, and five-foot leaden maul.

I agree that the premise is flawed. Warriors and their weapons/armour/tactics are products of the situations that created them. The only possible way to get a valid comparison is to compare warriors from similar situations.

It's all about context. Remove the warriors from their context and you've missed the point and will learn little about them.

It's all about context. Remove the warriors from their context and you've missed the point and will learn little about them.

It is hard to say in in any simple manner how fast armour and weapons changed, but it is obvious from historical study that tactics, and equipment varied significantly over periods of a couple of generations. If you could "time travel" a real historical warrior (one who trained, studied tactics from classic texts such as Vegetius, and even played games such as chess intended to reinforce tactical thinking), I believe the better ones would have adapted as well as possible to terrain, new weapons and formations, etc. Some biographical information on leaders such as the Black Prince indicate that they immersed themselves in training and studied available information of "foreign" arms and tactics so that they would know how to adapt if confronted with a foreign opponent. The idea that a period warrior would have blindly applied traditional tactics used in his "normal" battle situation to a new and completely different situation is something of an insult to history which often records the victors as ones who adapted to specific factors of the battle, and did something innovative in order to turn unusual situations to their advantage.Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence!

A better way to do this show would be to copy the Roman formula. Pick a couple of fighters with different weapons and armour and then modify the equipment to get as close a match between the two opponents as possible. e.g. someone with heavy armour would only have a knife, or give him a longer sword and shield but blindfold him. This would be far more entertaining than the current format.

I think more important than just historic research for DW is finding actual experts to represent the different warriors. The results are going to be skewed when, for example, you use low level stuntmen to test and demonstrate knightly fighting instead of people who actually study the material (the way those guys cut, I don't think they've ever held a real sword ).

I'll stop now before it turns into a rant about how a pirate beat a knight...Asst Instructor, Selohaar Fechtschule

While I agree that matching a CIA hitman against a Celtic Charioteer (for instance) has nothing but scant entertainment value, you might think about parings that really happened, and how these matches changed history.

i like deadliest warrior. its abhorrently silly and stupid, but i really laughed when the samurai tried to cut viking maille with his sword, and failed miserably.

Yes but that test had no bearing on the conclusion. Lets see, a katana can't cut the chainmail...but it can rack up a couple hundred kills. Hell the knight vs pirate test the early grenade and they conclude that the knights armor makes it utterly useless and the tests came out with it still doing some direct kills. And then there is the inconsistent tests. Some against dead bone, some against dead flesh, some againg balistic gel. They have NO standardization of tests. The only point of the show is to see how well the hanwei line up does at cutting things up as they seems to pretty much be using the hanwei line up. And if the general public just viewed this as entertainment, I wouldn't mind so much...but this show has brought up SO many stupidity in the general public that I just can not support the show.

I've watched a few episodes, mostly 'cause I like seeing things like ballistics gel torsos and pig carcasses being chopped up and things blown away/set on fire. But the "historians" and "experts" and fight outcomes are complete and utter rubbish. There is a laundry list of things that makes their efforts laughable.

They have no standardized testing - sometimes they test against ballistics gel, sometimes against hay bales, sometimes against store mannequins, sometimes against pig carcasses.

They rarely test the effectiveness of the various weapons against their opponent's armour and virtually ignore the effectiveness of shields (unless they run out weapons to assign a particular warrior in which case suddenly the shield qualifies as a "special weapon" as was the case with the "Spartan Warrior" and "Viking" for some reason).

Sometimes they'll pit "warriors" against each other one on one and then other times in packs of 5 against each other, seemingly with no real rhyme or reason. Also, the warriors they pick range from vague generalizations such as the Celtic Warrior (gee, Celt isn't one bit of a vague term), and the Knight (which century?) to very specific individuals such as Shaka Zulu, William Wallace, Alexander the Great, Vlad III to people who may not in fact have actually existed (Sun Tsu).

They pit warriors from differing eras against each other - bronze age against iron age, medieval against gunpowder seemingly with little rhyme or reason.

Weapons are invariably compared on a one for one basis instead of being looked at in context - for example in the Samurai versus Viking episode they compared the Katana against the Viking "longsword" (yeah, I know...) and they gave the "edge" to the katana... but if they're going to compare those two shouldn't it be Katana against Viking "longsword" & shield?

Weapons are pigeonholed into ridiculous categories, arbitrarily trying to force them into a "long, medium, short and special" weapons category (even if they make no sense) - sometimes a spear is considered a medium range weapon (Pilum), sometimes a long range weapon (for the Viking) and sometimes a purely melee weapon (for the Persian Immortal). Also sometimes medium range is considered melee while at other times it's just another form or ranged combat. Which brings me to my next point...

From what I can tell weapons are dedicated to a single role, which is to say that once a weapon has been declared a "ranged weapon" it can't be used for anything but that. For example in the "Samurai versus Viking" episode the Spear was considered the Viking's "Long Range" weapon. But really, shouldn't it be a long, medium and short range weapon? Since it's really more likely that the Viking would retain it and use it as a "first strike" sort of weapon in a melee clash - particularly in the case of a one on one battle? The same thing went for the "Lancea" spear for the Celts.

Also, what nutjob decided who gets what weapons? The knight was equipped with a crossbow, a "halberd" (they were using a poleaxe but hey), a "morning star" and a "broadsword". I mean wouldn't it be safe to assume that the knight's primary weapon would in fact be the lance from horseback? I mean call me crazy... but that's just the most glaring (and relevant to this board). Other gems they've picked: Kanabo for Samurai (I thought the Kanabo, as presented on the show, was mostly a mythical weapon used by Oni), the "Black Egg" for the Ninja, the "Grenado" for the Pirate, the "Ceramic Grenade" for the Yakuza, the "Ballistic Knife" for the Spetznatz (c'mon, really?), the "Ball and Chain" for William Wallace, the "Spit of Poison" for Shaka Zulu, the freakin' slingshot for the IRA (oddly enough they didn't think to pack a handgun, it seems), the Ballista for Alexander the Great (I thought that was more of a crew served weapon, but hey), the Mauser C96 Pistol and MP28 for the Waffen SS (wouldn't a Mauser 98K and Walther P-38 be more appropriate... or maybe a STG44 or an MP-38/40).

Anyway, it's a good in the sense that it actually gets some people interested arms and armor from the past, it's bad that it's filling their head with these ludicrous ideas. Hopefully enough people will develope enough of an interest to look beyond the Hollywood part of it. It's actually gotten some of my friends interested enough to where they've asked me my thoughts about it and I've been able to correct some of their misconceptions and so I can't say that it's all bad.

foremost, It's somewhat sad that I find myself an avid viewer. Mainly because im in high school, so in the testosterone bath that is my education, SPIKE=GOD. So I have to prepare myself for the big steaming pile of BS every Wendsday By watching every new episode on tuesday so I know whats coming at me.

But I do find myself laughing at all the ridiculous things on the show.

The armour! lol, I now call what theyre using on DW "fail mail" because of how bad it is. Round link, Butted, Blech! Also, WTF happened to the padding? It infuriates me because now everyone is going on and on about how all my historical ppl suck bc of this and this and this, and your wrong because SPIKE TV said so.

And WTF were they thinking when they chose warriors? Even if your pulling Persian Immortals and Celtic tribesman and roman centurions and rajputs out of nowhere and having them fight, at least they are all viable warriors. But Gangsters and Drug catels and Somalian pirates? WTF? SO now the average methhead is a real warrior because he bought his stuff from a cartel? Man, thats the kinda people I want in the army!

And who the hell are these "experts"??? These are all "credentials" from the show.
-Former cocaine smuggler
-descendant from X-warrior
-Mob bosses son
-Gladiator weapons instructor (WTF? and I thought that OUR studies were rare)
-Army veteran (this wasnt the green beret episode mind you)
-Spartan weapons specialist (I didnt know that they were the only ones to use the phalanx )
-MMA fighter
-Pirate weapons expert (the one who couldn't say how a flintlock works correctly)

What I think is really funny though, are the hosts.
-Max Geiger. Basically runs the show. Im pretty sure that he messes w/ the computer results as alot of weapons that everyone (except Max) agrees suck somehow get like 200 kills.

-Medical School dropout. What is his point? "Ok, here you have shoved a tomohawk through this mans head. I think he might be dead." "And here you have dismembered this person. He might be dead also."

-Dane Cook impersonator. Possibly more useless than the med school dropout, all he does is talk smack and look amazed. During the whole show, all you hear from this guy is "AWWWWW!!!!" "OUCHHHH!!!" "OH MY GOD!!!" "OH HOLY S***!!!!" Im relatively sure has a mild case of Turrets.

And the whole thing is just stupid. Even some of the more enlightened MMA fans are realizing what utter S*** is streaming from this TV show. Give them another season. I say that theyre gonna blow over soon.

Although, what happened to the "Warriors" show on discovery? I actually liked that. The guy actually examines the warrior in thier environment (where they have relevance) seemed to actually know what he was talking about. (and when he didn't he brought up actual historians and experts). and he genuinely seemed to really respect the warrior, and not treat them like they're some mindless fighting machine. Other than the occasional BS statement, and not getting the actual combat right (something that we have spent much time on and still don't totally have yet) It was actually educational and entertaining."Id rather be historically accurate than politically correct"

I never took Deadliest warror seriously, though I think some people do. Some of the tests are entertaining to watch, despite usually being flawed and 100% inconsistent, as was mentioned. Though I rarely watch the "battle re-creation." I really think the "results" thing is just so they have a reason to show the tests, it can't be taken seriously.

This is absolutely hilarious. I particularly like the clip from the Shao Lin monk vs. Maori warrior episode, showing the Shao Lin advocate using those spiked things to stab a dummy head about fifty times and gouge its eyeballs out, and that Rufus guy chiming in, "well, it turns out, scientifically, that'll kill ya!"

I sort of like the idea behind the show, I mean, it is an intriguing question: who would win between X and Y? While it's true that the most skilled fighter, regardless of his particular school or his weapons will generally be the winner, some historical warriors' weapons and training would probably give them a real, tangible advantage. Think of the Spanish conquistadors, for example, who found their steel weapons and armor, and their horses did indeed give them significant advantage over Aztec or Inca warriors with basically stone age technology. But having said that, the show is so unscientific, the tests are so uncontrolled and unstandardized, and the scenarios and often the weapons selected are so arbitrary, that it gets... ludicrous. I especially hate the tendency to match warriors against each other one on one, and then give one side a siege engine (!) as one of its weapons, as in the recent match up between the Roman centurion and the Indian Rajput where they show the Roman trying to employ a ballista in single combat. This sort of thing is just ridiculous.

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